"Trending toward insolvency." "The country's worst school system." "The murder capital of America." This is Rahm Emanuel's third year as mayor of Chicago, and everything is under control.

Sister Rosemary Connelly was not pleased with the mayor of Chicago. The head of Misericordia, a beloved home to 600 people with Down syndrome and other disabilities, the eighty-three-year-old nun might not at first glance seem to be in a position to carry much influence over city politics. But this is Chicago, and Misericordia offers gold-plated care in a state notorious

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for its nightmarish residential institutions. The children and siblings of the powerful—politicians, TV anchors, lawyers, developers—are cared for there, and an A-list of Chicago's leadership arrives on command, on bended knee and with an open checkbook.

It was 2011, and the City of Chicago had to bridge a massive budget deficit. Before he was even sworn into office, the mayor had announced that churches and social services would have to pay for the water from Lake Michigan like everybody else. With a stroke of the mayor's pen, Misericordia's water bill would go from zero to $350,000 a year. Sister Rosemary invited the mayor to speak to her fundraising breakfast. To his great credit, he showed up.

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In his benediction, Misericordia's Father Jack Clair felt inspired to bring a visual aid, a glass of water, to hold up and say, "Thank you, God, for the gift of water." Then he paused. "Oh," he said, looking at the mayor, "it's not a gift anymore."

At his turn to speak, the mayor returned fire. "I thought Jewish mothers had a corner on the market as it relates to guilt," he said. The issue lingered,
and two years later, when he appeared at a Special Olympics breakfast at the lush University Club, he spoke about the hard decisions that reality forces on leaders and about that time he made everybody pay for water, including Sister Rosemary, who was sitting in the audience. As soon as he finished speaking, he strode directly over to her

The common wisdom is that nobody of any heft will run against Rahm. Not in 2015. Maybe not ever.

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and gave her a big hug. In a city known for political brawling, the
mayor is a bastard's bastard, profoundly profane and epically vindictive. But this was not a fight he relished. Give him a ward heeler or a senator or a president, no problem. But a nun?

"You know what the mayor says about me?" she had told the table, minutes before, smiling beatifically, her pleasant, deeply lined face ringed with an angelic halo of white hair. "He says, 'Sister, you scare the shit out of me.' "

But Misericordia still pays for its water. Chicago is just that kind of place.

And the mayor is just that kind of guy.

Hey, it's the mayor!" shouts one of the men hanging around the entrance of the Walmart on Forty-seventh Street, an oasis of suburban plenty in Chicago's gritty, poor Back of the Yards neighborhood. "Mr. Mayor! Mr. Mayor! Can I take your picture?" he says, his voice dripping with barrio mockery. Words not spoken in the tone of someone who actually wants a photo, and Rahm Emanuel glides past without pause.

Inside the store, a midsize "Neighborhood Market," the scattering of Saturday-afternoon shoppers goes about its business while Rahm goes about his. Calling him "Emanuel" sounds wrong, like calling Elvis "Presley," and nobody in Chicago does it; he is "Rahm" or "the Mayor" or "Mr. Mayor." He hits every aisle, as methodically as if he were sweeping the floor, and if there's no one in it, he reverses like a robot vacuum cleaner that has hit the leg of a chair.

"Hey, how are you?" he calls to a clerk.

"I met you the last time," she reminds him.

Photographs by Ackerman + Gruber

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"I remember it," the mayor says, recovering. The shoppers are mostly black, some Hispanic—Rahm shifts seamlessly into guidebook Spanish. "Comó está?" he asks a young lady. A Vietnam-vet logo on a baseball cap worn by a black gentleman sparks "Thank you for your service." Some see him and dig out their cell phones. "Come back here, I need your picture," calls an elderly woman in an electric scooter, a clear plastic oxygen line under her nose, waving a phone. He greets, makes small talk, poses for pictures. No matter the flutter of posing or the banality of small talk, his smile remains warm, or an amazing facsimile of warmth, and there is no trace of the exasperation that a normal person, someone who is not a professional politician, might betray, save the occasional venting of some primal Rahmian need to bust chops. A five-seven, fifty-four-year-old fitness fanatic who exercises seven days a week, whose weight fluctuates between 149 and 150 pounds, who as a child put pinholes in his mother's cigarettes to protest her smoking, Rahm rebukes Walmart shoppers picking up alcohol and little else. "That's a lot of beer," he tells one young man hoisting an eighteen-pack of Modelo. "Don't drink it alone." (Rahm is what they call in Yiddish a kibitzer—he teases, he needles, he taunts, and even though he is in full greet-the-public mode, the booze hounds give him a chance to chide somebody.) Elsewhere in the store, Rahm sees a crying three-year-old standing next to a shopping cart, and checking first with Mom—or perhaps Grandma—he lifts him into the seat, calling for a pack of tissues from his press secretary to address the boy's runny nose. "You okay now? Better?" Then the lesson. "What do you say to Tarrah?" he asks the boy, who is silent. "Thank you?" prompts the mayor, himself a father of three. Working his way to the front of the store, Rahm says "I'm ready" to his security man, and they head out to the pair of big black Chevy Tahoes idling outside.

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An outsider witnessing this recent Saturday in the life of Rahm Emanuel might assume it is election time and he is campaigning. Only there is no campaign. The next Chicago mayoral election is February 24, 2015. He could stay hidden in City Hall, working the levers of power, and let his money—he's already raised more than $5 million for the 2015 election—do his runny-nose wiping. But he doesn't. Either because he loves people—his explanation—or because his disapproval numbers have never been higher, especially among black voters. He works seven days a week, a dawn-to-dusk whirling dervish, spinning like the dancer he once was, to assault the city's problems. The gun-violence epidemic that has earned Chicago the top spot on the FBI's murder rankings and headlines such as "the murder capital of America"; the ticking pension time bomb that could blow the whole place to kingdom come (or, worse, Detroit); the perpetually broken four-hundred-thousand-student school system in which more kids are shot each year than enter Ivy League universities, a funnel of failure in which, for every one hundred freshmen entering high school, six graduate from college: All come together in a veritable firestorm, one woe feeding the other, and his worst critics can't say he isn't trying to live up to LBJ's famous dictum to do everything—everything possible—to succeed, though as recently as Christmas, Chicagoans thought less of Rahm Emanuel, clean-living fitness buff, beavering away at Chicago's forest of woes, than the citizens in Toronto thought of their crack-cocaine-smoking mayor.

Chicago is just that kind of place, too.

"I got challenges, yes," he says, and he knows, better than anyone, how much is at stake. "The next two years will decide whether or not Chicago will be in the top tier of twenty-five global cities or not. London is secure. New York. Tokyo. Chicago could go up or down." And for the mayor of Chicago, a man who, like countless others before him, arrived at his dream job only to find a godforsaken mess, the next two years will determine whether he's the savior that he so desperately wants to be or just another politician who gets heckled at Walmart.

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With Michael Bloomberg's fingers finally pried off the New York City mayor's office, and his successor, Bill de Blasio, spending the next few years trying to find all the bathrooms in Gracie Mansion, Rahm Emanuel is the nation's reigning mayor. Nobody else comes close. The mayor of Los Angeles? Few outside Los Angeles County could guess his name. (Eric Garcetti, if you must know.) This at a time when mayors of big cities are enjoying renewed attention, the result of the national government seizing up in partisan gridlock at home and running short on energy and ideas abroad. "The nation-state is failing us on the global scale," writes Benjamin R. Barber in If Mayors Ruled the World. "The city, always the human habitat of first resort, has in today's globalizing world once again become democracy's best hope."

No one would call Rahm an avatar of "democracy's best hope." Tom Dart, the Cook County Sheriff, hasn't spoken to Rahm in person in the nearly three years since he took office, despite housing ten thousand prisoners inside city limits, and said through a spokesman that Rahm might as well be Vladimir Putin or David Cameron to him. (Dart was briefly in the race for mayor, but then Rahm entered and he bolted like a fawn.) The common wisdom is that nobody of any heft will run against Rahm when he's up again. Not in 2015. Maybe not ever. His predecessor, Richard M. Daley, never faced a serious electoral challenge in twenty-two years as mayor. In his last election, in 2007, Daley racked up more than triple the votes of his nearest opponent. Daley made sure any significant potential foes were smothered in the cradle.

Daley's father, Richard J. Daley, died in office, after twenty-one years as the archetypical big-city boss. Daley II sort of died in office, too, though not in the corporeal sense. Between Chicago failing to secure the 2016 Olympics and his beloved wife, Maggie, battling cancer, the light left Daley's eyes, and he decided not to follow his father's example, announcing his retirement in the fall of 2010. He also must have heard the approaching hoofbeats of the various civic disasters he had midwifed: not just buying popularity by promising pension money that the city didn't have and—whoops—never would, but selling Chicago's parking-meter concession for a disastrously low price, leaving $1 billion on the table, and spending in the short term what was supposed to be a long-term nest egg. Chicagoans focus so much on Daley's personal tragedy these days because it's painful to think that our favorite son mismanaged the city during his last decade in office and then skipped out, like a husband who blows the kids' college fund at a casino and vanishes.

The ticking pension time bomb could blow the whole place to kingdom come (or, worse, Detroit)...and Rahm doesn't have a lot of control.

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Still: Rahm wanted Daley's job, even knowing he would be inheriting an epic mess. "I didn't want to someday say, 'I should have run for mayor,' " says Rahm, of what he insists was an impetuous leap into the race. Daley announced his retirement on September 7, 2010. On October 1, Emanuel resigned from the White House and began a "listening tour" of Chicago neighborhoods, formally announcing his candidacy a month later. As chief of staff in the Obama White House, Emanuel had a hand in every pot, and contrary to reports, he claims his relationship with Barack Obama had not soured by the end of his tenure. "He wanted me to stay," says Rahm, pointing to a large photo in his office of the president and him in close conversation. "We were actually talking about a Cabinet slot." (He doesn't mention that, at the time, most Cabinet members not named Clinton or Gates were so thoroughly ignored that, according to one White House source, "Those guys might as well be in the witness-protection program.")

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Instead, Rahm became the embodiment of the supposed shift from nations to cities at perhaps the least auspicious moment possible—the man who walked away from the epicenter of federal power to discover not so much a new federalism as a sort of austere new feudalism in which the cities were being loaded with responsibilities that Washington was shedding and expected to pay for them into the bargain.

And for that honor, he first had to get elected. The 2011 mayor's race was a street fight in the grand Chicago tradition. At one point, a dozen pols were running or threatening to run. There were several aldermen, plus Rev. James T. Meeks, the outspoken minister of the giant Salem Baptist Church, who announced that, when elected, he would keep his pulpit. There was Sheriff Dart, the photogenic, curly-haired law-and-order candidate. And there was even a celebrity, former senator Carol Moseley Braun, who provided the election's nadir by falsely accusing the most marginal candidate, a community activist named Patricia Van Pelt-Watkins, of spending the last twenty years "strung out on crack."

Rahm's candidacy was questioned in court: His enemies argued that by moving to Washington, D. C., for twenty months to serve in the White House, Rahm voided the residency needed to be eligible to run for mayor. And "enemies" means Alderman Ed Burke, the man many believe was behind the effort to disenfranchise Emanuel. The longest-serving alderman in Chicago, Burke is a white-haired, red-faced former cop, with round glasses and tailored pinstripe suits, the head of the city council's finance committee, who has become immensely rich himself. Burke's own thwarted mayoral aspirations form his dark and complicated backstory, but ask Burke about Rahm and the election face-to-face, and he will pause and look at you, quizzical and silent, almost hurt, as if slightly offended you would imagine he might ever comment on a thing like that, particularly to you, whom he once personally gave a gold star in a leather police wallet designating you as his "Special Aide." Nobody grabs the devil's tail and demands he dance.

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Rahm won the question in the Illinois Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously in his favor. The prospect of facing his buzz saw of organization and cash drove most would-be opponents out of the race before the casting of ballots, and he trounced the five who remained, earning 10 percent more votes in the primary than all of his challengers combined. One of Rahm's first acts as mayor was to cut Ed Burke's personal bodyguard detail from four Chicago police officers to two. (Rahm points out that he also cut Rich Daley's protection as well as his own to get more cops out on the street. The people of Chicago could sleep easier knowing those five or six cops were now freed up to fight crime.)

Rahm makes a point of never criticizing Daley, even as he tries to squeegee away the muck he left behind everywhere, and he is, in a very real sense, Daley's heir. Both men unconsciously raise their voices a couple octaves when put on the spot—it's unsettling to hear Daley's squeak come out of Rahm. Both elevate love of family into a public asset while remaining intensely private about it when convenient. Maggie Daley rarely sat down for an interview while her husband was in office. Rahm's wife, Amy, similarly has vanished into political purdah. (The lone exception of late: agreeing to utter a few words at a fundraiser for—good heavens!—Misericordia. Sister Rosemary will not be denied.) Like Daley, Rahm is intimate with power in both subtle and crude forms, with getting things done, with molding public opinion, stroking friends, gelding rivals. "Chicago police officers look at Mayor Emanuel like he is Mayor Daley on steroids," says Mike Shields, a third-generation cop and until recently president of the Fraternal Order of Police. Rahm got to where he is not by flights of rhetoric or combustible charisma but through endless effort.

Anyone wishing to understand that work ethic should look closely at his first race for Congress. He had made his name after seven years in Clintonworld, rising from staffer on the first presidential campaign to senior advisor in the White House. "Rahm was so aggressive he made me look laid back," Bill Clinton says in his memoirs. He was also known for his affection for obscenity; his vindictive glee at victory; his contempt for dissent; his sending a dead fish to a pollster who came up with the wrong numbers; his right-hand middle-finger's missing tip, lost to an infection that almost killed him after he sliced it at his high school job at Arby's before going for a swim in Lake Michigan: All of it added to a polished veneer of menace. He then went on to make his fortune, earning $18 million during two and a half years as an investment banker for New York's Wasserstein Perella. And then, in 2002, he stepped out from behind the velvet curtain, running against a neighborhood activist, Nancy Kaszak, the product of Chicago's largely Polish Fifth Congressional District, former stomping ground of Dan Rostenkowski, to fill the seat left vacant by Rod Blagojevich, who relocated to the governor's office on his journey to prison. Rahm was damned as a Washington insider; Kaszak's TV commercials showed him in the back of a limo, murmuring into a phone. The head of the Polish American Congress condemned Rahm as a former Israeli soldier. (In reality, he never served, but volunteered as a civilian at an Israeli military base in 1991, where he repaired brakes.) At one point, Rahm trailed Kaszak by fifteen points. But he won by ringing more doorbells, kissing more babies, and spending more money—he raised more than $3 million, more than three times what Kaszak did. Rahm was reelected three times and had become a power in Congress as chairman of the House Democratic Caucus when Obama demanded he be his chief of staff. Rahm resisted; his dream was to be the first Jewish Speaker of the House. He would call his older brother, Zeke, a bioethicist, and shout, "I don't want to do it! I don't have to do it!" But he did.

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Once a week, the mayor of Chicago teaches a civics class at public schools across the city. Today he's at Horace Greeley Elementary School, a seventies-era redbrick box on the North Side, in Chris D'Alessio's eighth-grade social-studies class.

"We just finished economics," D'Alessio, a fifteen-year veteran teacher, tells Rahm. "We did a lot of brainstorming on the budgets, and I'm sure that's something you think about on a daily basis."

"I try to avoid it," Rahm deadpans, and then, standing in his shirtsleeves at the front of the room, dives into the murk of Chicago's finances.

The man behind the men: Emanuel with then-candidate Bill Clinton in 1992; he would go on to serve as the president's senior advisor; with then-candidate Barack Obama in 2008, five months prior to becoming his chief of staff; and working as chief fundraiser for Richard M. Daley's first campaign for mayor in 1989.

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Asked if the pension is the biggest problem he is facing, he replies simply, "Yes." Then he's off, and he keeps slipping into the past tense—"The pension issue that I was facing this year . . ."—was, as if it's all solved now.

"Here's my balancing act," Rahm says. "How do we keep investing in the future without letting the past steal from it?" He quickly segues into free tutoring at the library and needs to be reeled back to pensions. The city's park-district employees have agreed to pension restructuring. The rest, he implies, will follow. He prefers not to consider the pain the cuts will cause thousands of city workers who had a deal they thought they could believe in.

"You say 'pain.' That's not wrong, so I'm not challenging that," Rahm begins. "I would argue—this is not just spin, although you could . . ." You can almost see the various political force vectors buffeting every thought before it finally escapes his mouth. ". . . I think this is the morally important thing to do. I can now look at every employee of the park district and say, With every pay stub you are contributing, what you are expecting will be there. Did you give up your [cost of living adjustment]? Are you not going to get it at fifty or fifty-one but going to have to push it off to fifty-eight? Yes. But I can't do that with a firefighter. I can't do that with a police officer. I can't do that to somebody in the municipal labor of the city. I can't look them in the eye and say that." Like the political operative he once was, he frames any situation in the context not of what is right or fair or decent but of what is possible. The issue, in Rahm's view, isn't city workers who signed a contract filled with promises; the issue is that those promises were never real to begin with, and the only choice he has is to replace them with something that actually might happen. "Life is a series of choices," Rahm says. "You may have to work longer, and that is pain. And it is also certainty. My view is I would like to give more certainty to more people, which doesn't exist today."

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Others take a different view. "There's nothing like kicking around some poor people to prove that you're making the tough decisions to fix the city," noted The Chicago Reader, the city's gritty free newspaper. "How can police officers be on the hook for the city's failure?" asked the Fraternal Order of Police's Mike Shields who, like Tom Dart, has never spoken to the mayor since he took office. "His type of leadership is destroying the relationships traditionally forged with City Hall," says Alderman Bob Fioretti, the mayor's most vocal critic on the city council. "He is divisive toward many of the groups that have traditionally formed the Democratic base: police, firefighters, and all the African-American community."

Rahm was elected with 59 percent of the black vote, an impressive statistic considering he ran against Moseley Braun and two other black opponents. His popularity was ascribed to the "Obama Effect"—he was the president's pal. But more recent polls—and Rahm is a big believer in polls—show growing disapproval of the job he is doing, particularly by black voters, whose disapproval rose from a third to nearly a half. (It increased among whites, too, but only slightly.) In response, Rahm launched what one black alderman called the "Black Tour," snaring an upscale Whole Foods for violence-plagued Englewood, renaming a major thoroughfare for a beloved black bishop. Fioretti says the symbolics don't fool people, who are turned off not only by what the mayor's doing—yanking back pension perks, closing schools—but how he's doing it. "It's either his way or no way at all," Fioretti says. "I see all the damaged relationships out there." Fioretti, for what it's worth, is the kind of Chicago character who might end up running against the mayor someday. "You never know," Fioretti says when asked if he might run, a coyness that belies what would happen to any politician who challenges Rahm at election time— as eloquently described by another Chicago pol: "He'll cut your balls off and feed them to you every day." To which Rahm, when told of that statement, adds gleefully, "On a cracker!"

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No relationship was wrecked more than the one with his primary nemesis—the Immovable Object to his Irresistible Force—Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union and an improbable figure: a large, trash-talking African-American woman who went to Dartmouth, loves opera, speaks French, is Jewish too, and has no reluctance to snatch up her own sharp instrument and lunge at the mayor's privates. Lewis says their first meeting was at Henri, an upscale Michigan Avenue restaurant, where Rahm turned on the charm.

"It worked," she recalls. "I was charmed. Of course I was charmed. Why wouldn't you be charmed?" She remembers thinking: Okay, this is a guy I could work with. We have a lot in common.

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While she was basking in that glow, Rahm got a state law passed requiring 75 percent of the teachers union to approve a strike before it can legally take place.

"We had a meeting, and immediately he went to Springfield to start taking away every single right we had," Lewis says. "He was doing everything legally he could to destroy me and destroy my membership."

The 75 percent threshold was supposed to be impossibly high. But what it did was galvanize the union, which came roaring out of the grave Rahm had dug for it. Lewis cannily held the strike vote not in the fall, when school began, but in June, when it ended. Nearly 90 percent of her members voted to authorize a strike, and when the nine-day teachers strike ended with a contract viewed as favorable to the teachers—average pay increases of 17 percent over four years from a school system already a billion dollars in debt—the mayor was dealt his first major defeat.

Another point of dispute was a longer school day and year. Rahm had made a campaign issue out of lengthening both in Chicago, which then had the shortest school day in the nation. Teachers saw this as dumping more work on their shoulders while cutting their pay, and it led to a notorious confrontation between Lewis and the mayor, which Lewis lovingly described afterward for the press, explaining how the mayor "exploded" at her when she said the CTU teachers were not babysitters.

"Fuck you, Lewis," Rahm said. The mayor does not deny saying that, but points out that at the end of the meeting they hugged, which might be Rahm Emanuel in a nutshell: He tells you to fuck off, then you hug him. "It seems as if he has contempt for everyone else and thinks they're all stupid," says Lewis. "Everybody's stupid. He thinks I'm stupid."

He's a hugger: Emanuel embraces Sister Rosemary Connelly of Misericordia following a recent fundraiser. He also once hugged Karen Lewis of the Chicago Teachers Union (seen here leading the nine-day teachers strike), but only after telling her "Fuck you, Lewis."

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"Here's the measure I'm going to have for myself," Rahm says. "William Bennett"—Reagan's secretary of education— "came [in 1987] and said [Chicago's] is the worst public-school system in the country. I'm going to prove him wrong. I'm going to show you it's the best public-school system in any major city in America. That's why I wanted to be mayor. This is going to be one of the great turnarounds of any public-school system." Like Daley before him, Rahm likes to talk about charter schools—private schools, basically, that sidestep the teachers union, cutting expenses, eliminating bloat, drawing in corporate funding. He successfully pushed for a longer school day and year, full-day kindergarten, and after-school programs to keep kids off the streets. Talk to Rahm and his people will tell you about green shoots in the city's school system—

test scores are up; graduation rates, once 50 percent, are now 65 percent, and within five years, Rahm insists, they will be 80 percent. But that great turnaround? Ask Karen Lewis and the thousand recently laid-off teachers how it's going. Ask the thirty thousand kids displaced by the closings of fifty public schools this past summer (the largest mass school closing in history), most of them in poor and/or African-American communities. Ask the parents of the 319 children who were shot, 24 of them fatally, during the 2012 academic year. Ask the authors of the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the country's report card, who detail how Chicago trails most other U. S. cities in math and reading at both the fourth- and eighth-grade levels. Chances are their outlook isn't quite so rosy.

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If you mention Chicago in rural China, nobody rubs their thumbs and forefingers together and says, "ka-ching, ka-ching, fiscal insolvency." Their hands form a machine gun.

Violent crime stains Chicago's name and has for nearly a century. While places like New York and Los Angeles have managed to fix their murder problem, Chicago hasn't. In 2012, Rahm's first full year in office, murder soared 16 percent and Chicago was dubbed the country's murder capital, its 500 homicides surpassing far larger New York City's 419 and slightly bigger Los Angeles's 299.

Over just one weekend, 49 people were shot in Chicago, including a six-year-old who was killed as she sat on her family's front porch.

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Rahm's first step in the battle against gun violence was to bring in former Newark, New Jersey, police director Garry McCarthy as superintendent of the Chicago Police Department. "People look at Rahm Emanuel, he's a very polarizing individual," says McCarthy, who spent the first twenty-five years of his career with the New York City police. "One thing people talk about him is that he's a micromanager. That has not been my experience. He's a very high-energy person. A very driven person. His expectations are very high." McCarthy believes that one reason Chicago crime is so much worse than other big cities' is that its department wasn't fighting crime right. "The first thing I did was get cops back in beat cars," says McCarthy. He and Rahm pushed saturating "impact zones" with officers—flooding targeted high-crime areas with beat cops—and the approach seems to be working. "Right now, our overall crime rate—burglaries, robberies, auto theft, and shootings—two years running, down 23 percent," Rahm correctly says. "It's the lowest level since '66, '65. These are the facts. Two years running."

Of course "overall crime" is not what is causing "Murder City" headlines in Norway. The murder rate in Chicago—18.5 per 100,000 residents—is still three times that of New York City and double that of Los Angeles. And for that, the mayor points to Chicago's thornier gang problems and Illinois's laxer gun laws. "We have historically a more significant gang problem than either of those cities and a more significant gun problem than either of those cities," he says. "This predates Rahm Emanuel. Our gang problem or gun problem predates me. New York and Los Angeles have tougher gun laws." Three years into his Chicago tenure, Superintendent McCarthy says the city remains loaded with guns: "We seize three guns for every one New York City seizes. Per capita, that's nine to one. [But] nobody goes to jail for gun possession in Illinois." And so the mayor has gone to Springfield, trying, unsuccessfully, to lobby the legislature to pass mandatory minimum-sentence laws for gun violations.

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"I've worked for Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, Cory Booker, and now Rahm Emanuel," says McCarthy. "The mayor gets it." Which seems exactly the kind of thing that anybody working for Rahm Emanuel would say to a city reporter—"on a cracker!"—if only all the evidence didn't support him. At the close of 2013, Rahm and McCarthy proudly announced that their diligent efforts had paid off—only 415 murders, down 17 percent from the year before— overlooking that most big American cities saw their murder rates plunge as much or more. Eight of the nation's ten largest cities reported murder falling. Philadelphia's murders fell by 25 percent; New York City's fell 20 percent. Rahm somehow never got to these figures. Put in the proper context, Chicago doesn't really have much to crow about. The lowest number of murders since 1965? Congratulations, Mr. Mayor. But New York had the lowest since 1958. Los Angeles's murders were down 14 percent, part of ten consecutive years of falling L. A. crime, leading it to be dubbed "the safest big city in America." Still, credit where credit is due: Chicago under Rahm Emanuel is the safest it's been in a generation. And if he wants to take all that credit, who are we, the people of Chicago, to stop him?

For as much as he likes to talk (and talk and talk), Rahm is not what anyone would describe as a font of candid self-assessment, and his older brother, Zeke, one third of the world-famous Emanuel brothers, spells out why. "The emotional vocabulary in our family was limited," he writes in his memoir. "We were never encouraged to articulate our deeper feelings." It might not comfort outraged parents whose local schools have been shuttered without the traditional mayoral hand-holding to know that Rahm's father bought their house in Wilmette without consulting Rahm's mother. But it explains a lot. And it might not help those on the receiving end of Rahm's poison-tipped darts to know that his mother, a civil-rights advocate who dragged her sons along to protests, would tell them, "I hate all of you equally" and once picketed the home of a neighbor. But it reminds you that as smart as Rahm is, there is a hard-wired I-win-you-lose subsystem, a gerbil-on-a-wheel spinning in his head, and sometimes it betrays him.

Patiently explain to Rahm that people don't necessarily relate to a man who never misses a workout, who exercised in the two hours between arriving on a flight from Brazil and meeting the president of the United States at a school. Does he never just lie on the sofa with a pint of Ben & Jerry's on his chest? Are there no guilty, lazy pleasures?

"I will have one piece of chocolate every night," he confesses. A few M&M's or one frozen mini-Reese's cup. One. "But I'm stopping that."

The man feels compelled to quickly cinch up anything in himself that may be taken for the smallest sign of human weakness, as if it's a slippery slope from one frozen mini-Reese's cup to capitulating to the needs of pensioners. Or give a guy a few M&M's and the next thing you know he's admitting that he doesn't know how to stop the bloodshed on the South Side. Rahm can't admit to a lapse, not even a tiny one. Any theoretical weakness is insignificant, regrettable, and being worked on. Asked if he has ever failed in his life, he mentions the infected finger, when he was seventeen. "Nearly died," he says. Pressed for something more recent, something in his professional life, he relates how, in 1993, Hillary Clinton almost forced him out of the White House, in part for clashing with her people. "After everything I had done, I was out the door," he says. "And everything I had seen in my professional life passed in front of me." But he refused to leave until the president told him he was fired. "Four years later, I was his senior advisor," says Rahm. Not exactly a conventional image of failure. So what does it mean that Rahm Emanuel really can't think of anything? Well, it might mean that he's better than his enemies, or it might mean that the force of his will will carry the day on violent crime (looking good) and troubled schools (stay tuned) and the pension bomb (who the hell knows?), and that the City of Big Shoulders has found in Rahm the perfect turnaround artist.

Or it might mean that he is full of shit.

For at least the next year, Rahm Emanuel will be the mayor of Chicago, and now is as good a time as any to ask what Chicagoans actually want from their mayor. For forty-three of the past fifty-nine years, they wanted a guy named Daley—not a perfect guy, God knows. Not a genius. But a home-grown guy. Chicago is a place where we famously "don't want nobody nobody sent."

Barring a Daley, what then? Chicago wants a mayor who looks like them. Harold Washington accomplished almost nothing in office, mostly due to relentless opposition from a racially divided city council, but was the pride and delight of a city that is a third black. Or it wants a colorful loose cannon, like Jane Byrne, Chicago's crazy aunt, who came in as an outsider, and then, despairing at getting anything done, embraced the very machine she had denounced, throwing big block parties to take our mind off how bad everything was. And now we have Rahm, a force of nature, doing the best he can (which, frankly, is pretty good) given monumentally shitty circumstances, who, about once a week, rides the L to work, leaving his attractive but not opulent pale-green Ravenswood home and getting on the Brown Line at Montrose Avenue. Anyone who wants to talk to him can do so there. Rahm positions himself by the train-car door, standing, reading—in a rare lapse of image-consciousness—The New York Times. Ready for his critics. At every stop, every time the doors slide open, he raises his head, expectant. There's a look in his eye, wary and hopeful, like a kid waiting to be picked for kickball. Most commuters, locked in their morning routine, blow by, not noticing. Others glance at him and keep going. A few nod or say hello. Nobody says anything of substance. When you point this out to Rahm, he has an answer (he always has an answer): It's still early, 7:15. On a later train, he says, people are more awake. They'll be more ready, more eager, to talk to their mayor.